Music

September 29, 2016

In June, 2016, Terrance Hayes visited Florida to read and teach in the University of Tampa low-residency M.F.A. program. In the course of his presentation, he made a comment about syntax and sound that struck me as important, and worth exploring. Despite our both being distracted by the seventh game of the N.B.A. Finals later that evening—a game to ruin any Davidson College professor’s mood—we agreed to correspond via email, and this conversation ensued.

Terrance Hayes is the author of five collections of poetry, including How To Be Drawn in 2015. His honors include a 2010 National Book Award, a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship and a 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry. His website is terrancehayes.com.

AMP: Welcome to the non-place of email. Let's dive in, over our heads.... If I understood correctly, sometime in your artisitic development, you began to associate the extension of syntax with the production of a different kind of music within the poem. Is that an identifiable moment? Would you care to elaborate?

TH: I was drawn to syntax early in my reading life. It was the feeling something beyond words was being communicated in the bones of poems. Certainly that was my experience of Keats’ “To Autumn”— specially that first stanza. When I first read it in college, I didn’t associate its power (mellow, carnal oozing power) with the fact it was a single over brimming sentence:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

The same feeling came in certain passages of prose. I remember a college professor beginning to sob as he read Molly Bloom’s soliloquy of yes in Ulysses. It’s one of the longest sentences in the English language (4391 words according to Wikipedia). I must have associated the sentence’s breathless charge with his emotional reaction. There were no periods—he couldn’t take a breath to collect himself. I’m still trying to create that sense of charge and “o’er-brimm’d-ness” in my work.

AMP: I love your description of the “o’er-brimm’d”: that’s a great ambition. In that passage, Keats also holds it together contrapuntally, via end-rhyme and those almost-parallel caesuras in lines 7-9, which lead us to read backwards into memory as we move forward in the sentence. Is that something you do too? Or, rather, what’s your way of managing the length and breath of such a charged sentence?

TH: I see “contrapuntal” and “caesuras” and get a tad nervous. Especially when thinking about my early drafts of a poem. I mostly follow something closer to what Frost called “the sound of sense”:

“Now it is possible to have sense without the sound of sense (as in much prose that is supposed to pass muster but makes very dull reading) and the sound of sense without sense (as in Alice in Wonderland which makes anything but dull reading). The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words.”

I am trying to find the sense in a sentence: its sense of rhythm, its sense of verbs and nouns, its sense of thought and sound. I work in units of sentences as often as I work in units of line and image.

AMP: Cool, those connections that you draw between a sentence’s musical properties and its meanings....

“Rhythm” is a term that I tend to fudge when I’m discussing sound and sense; it’s such a difficult concept. Maybe I can ask you to consider an example from Frost, and talk a little more about rhythm.

I think that one way to read these lines is as a discussion of rhythm, the riffles in the water “contraries,” as Frost calls them elsewhere in the poem. Would such a metaphor be consistent with your use of “rhythm”? Or are you thinking of the rhythm of a sentence in another way? Could you elaborate upon your use of the term?

TH: The word “rhythm" is fluid. Sometimes I’m thinking about varying the length and speed of a sentence. As in the first poem in my collection Wind In A Box. (Is it self-important to refer to one my own poems?) That’s sort of an exercise in staccato sentences. And in the ways punctuation impact a sentence. A series of periods, some slashes, a dash:

WIND IN A BOX

This ink. This name. This blood. This blunder.

This blood. This loss. This lonesome wind. This canyon.

This / twin / swiftly / paddling / shadow blooming

an inch above the carpet—. This cry. This mud.

But most times I’m thinking of rhythm as a kind of pattern. As in the ways subordinate clauses and repetition can expand a sentence. Especially the way lists can expand a sentence. The catalogues of Whitman and his Beat progeny, for example. Ginsberg spins wildly creating a fog of image that first long, elastic sentence of “Howl.” That first sentence is one of the most technically dazzling dimensions of “Howl.” I don’t know if that answers your question. I agree rhythm is a difficult concept. Because it is such a personal/intuitive concept.

AMP: Now that we’re talking about sentences in your work expressly, I’d love to hear you comment upon one or more of the poems in your latest book, How To Be Drawn. In light of this conversation, I’m especially interested in the formal play in “Who Are The Tribes," the “Portrait of Etheridge Knight…," and “Some Maps to Indicate Pittsburgh”—all of which use words inside boxes and/or charts. Care to dig in a bit?

TH: The notion of “formal play” is on the mark. What it suggests is I’m just playing—or trying to play outside my given tendencies. Since sentences are my default inclination, the poems you mentioned are instances of trying something different. Of trying to shift my focus. They are genuine, intimate experiments. Meaning I don’t see them as natural extensions of the sentence. Though you’ll find maybe some syntactical play, the attention is given to form. Not that I’m Jordan—I’m no Jordan, but it’s akin to asking Jordan the relationship between his dunks and his work on his jumper or his defense. He was, when he developed his jumper and defensive prowess, only trying to broaden his skills…

AMP: So what’s next, in terms of formal play? Is there a kind of poem you’re working on, that you haven’t been able to write?

TH: Great question. I’m mostly/usually concerned with the last poem and the next poem. The last poem was accompanied with drawings. The next poem is presently several scraps waiting to find a shape. The poems of late have been pretty long. The poem before the last poem was over 1200 words. So I’ve been trying to work my way back to compression via sonnets lately. But I don’t know. I don’t mind not knowing.

AMP: I’m going to highlight a phrase from your latest excellent response, and take the conversation in a slightly different direction.

You write, “The next poem is presently several scraps waiting to find a shape.” Do you think this is true—that phrases, or scraps, or oddments, are “waiting to find a shape”? Maybe the shape is yours, and you have certain shapes internalized that wait for the scraps you collect by writing? Or… maybe there are shapes waiting to find scraps… in the culture? Care to comment?

TH: Yes, I mean scraps waiting to find a shape. As in what I suspect happens in quilt making. I’m just gathering bright bits of thoughts and conversations, imagery in my notebook. Waiting to stitch/thread something compelling together. Usually the brightest bit becomes the poem’s heart, its engine.

AMP: You mention your notebook. Could you talk a bit about how your process might elucidate the quest for “o’er-brimm’d-ness” in the syntax? How do you handle, literally, the writing, so as to facilitate in the composition process the ambitions you identified earlier?

TH: I have to talk about basketball again here. I can’t say I’m handling the writing so much as continuously practicing with it. I am trying to broaden my facility with it. I am practicing form, of course, but I am also practicing thinking and feeling. It’s all practice. That’s what Thelonius Monk says. For me, poetry is all practice. Occasionally practice pauses for a game—which is to say, some of my poems get published— but my habit is practice. I’m practicing to sustain my strengths while strengthening my weaknesses. I like a long sentence, for example. So I have to push myself towards new challenges with long sentences. One of my challenges/experiments in How to Be Drawn was to push myself into longer poems. These days I’m trying to work my way back to the sonnet. It all takes practice. One can fail in practice. One can experiment and scrimmage. There is intimacy and measure. Practice is a laboratory, a workhouse, a habit. For me, poetry is the practice of language. —June-September, 2016

July 11, 2016

That's George Gershwin, on the left, with his older brother, Ira Gershwin, who wrote the words not only for George's songs but -- especially after George's untimely death on July 11,1937 -- for songs by Jerome Kern ("Long Ago and Far Away"), Vernon Duke ("I Can't Get Started"), and Harold Arlen (The Man That Got Away"). As John Tranter, in his review of Ira Gershwin: The Art of the Lyricist by Philip Furia (Oxford University Press), puts it, the Gershwins and their confreres "took America’s dreams and set them to music." Here is the rest of Tranter's review.

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Shelley claimed that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but then Shelley was mad. Poets have missed out on the law courts, but they have carved a comfortable niche for themselves in the business of advice to the lovelorn. In the modern world, rhymers have set the rules for popular emotions, especially when young folks’ fancies turn to thoughts of love.

Poetry of course is everywhere, and has been since the invention of radio: vibrating through the walls of our homes and over the oceans, amplitude or frequency modulating waves in the radio spectrum to the tunes of popular songs and ads for hair cream, and squealing from a thousand Walkmans.

Most of these song lyrics are drivel. The Romantic poet Keats set a bad example by rhyming ‘moon’ and ‘June’ in his poem ‘Endymion’, and it’s been downhill ever since. ‘Sun’ and ‘fun’ are generally the best it gets these days, as the Beach Boys remind us. But it’s not all rubbish. Much of this writing was cleverly done, especially in the twenties and thirties, and the best of it had a special sparkle.

New York between the wars was America’s equivalent of the Elizabethan Age: exciting, dangerous, filled with the discovery of exotic art, music and literature. Dorothy Parker and the wits of the Algonquin ‘round table’ were popular among the clever set, but much more widely popular among every set were musicians like the gifted George Gershwin and songwriters like his inventive older brother Ira.

They took America’s dreams and set them to music — George produced the tune, Ira crafted the words. They collaborated on hundreds of songs — by the time Ira died in 1983 he had written more than 700, including But Not For Me, Fascinating Rhythm, I Can’t Get Started, I Got Rhythm, Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off, Love Walked In, Shall We Dance, Someone to Watch over Me, and They Can’t Take That Away From Me.

There were plenty of turkeys, too — songs like Uh-Uh, Blah Blah Blah, Please Send My Daddy Back to My Mother, The Gazooka, and I’m a Poached Egg.

Ira was born Israel Gershvin in 1896. The family, Russian immigrants originally named Gershovitz, changed their name to Gershvin when they arrived in America (and to Gershwin later, when George had his first hit under that name.) They lived at various addresses in Manhattan as the father moved from one business to another.

Ira was a clever boy — he won a scholarship to Townsend Harris Hall, a high school for bright kids from the Lower East Side. But when the family bought a piano, it was George — likeable, impulsive and energetic — who got to play it. Ira was the shy and thoughtful one — family friends said he was usually to be found standing a little to one side, out of the limelight, browsing through a book.

The teaching of English has so degenerated these days that it’s hard to believe that Ira’s school curriculum included a rigorous training in classical verse forms such as the ballad, the triolet, the rondeau, the villanelle and the sonnet, but it did.

In the first decades of the century the daily newspapers in New York were full of poetry too: there were columns devoted to light verse, and often a theatre review or sports notice would be written in couplets or quatrains. Ira used to cut out his favourite poems and pasting them into a scrapbook, and imitate them in his school magazine. He was soon buying anthologies of verse, and eventually owned more than two hundred volumes. He drew on all that knowledge for his songs.

In an introduction to Lyrics on Several Occasions, a 1959 collection of his work, Ira wrote ‘resemblance to actual poetry, living or dead, is highly improbable.’ Maybe; but the literary skill required was formidable.

His songs were apparently simple — they had to be — but that simplicity took a lot to achieve. He wrote, and rewrote, and rewrote again. His nickname among his colleagues was ‘The Jeweller’.

The songwriter of the period was looking for a balance between wit — which often involved puns and complicated rhymes — and ‘singability’, the fluent flow of syllables along the surface of the tune. Ira achieved this balance more often than most, though many of his all-night efforts were dumped when the storyline of a musical or review — the ‘book’, in theatre parlance — had to be changed.

Most of the Gershwins’ collaborative work was done for Broadway musical theatre. They moved to Hollywood in the thirties to tackle the movies — a much more difficult proposition due to the demands of the machinery of movie-making, and the callousness of the producers and studio bosses.

They’d hardly begun when George died of a brain tumour in 1937, and the oomph went out of Ira’s life. He went on working, on movies such as A Star is Born and An American in Paris, struggling to contrive songs that would make the Hollywood moguls happy. He even wrote words for many of the dozens of unpublished melodies George had left behind, in a ghostly kind of posthumous collaboration.

For a writer of sophisticated songs about love and passion, Ira’s own life seems to have been suburban and uneventful. Perhaps, like Flaubert, he led a dull life in order to create the conditions to enable him to make brilliant art.

This book is mainly about that art, and it ends up being not much more than a chronicle of Ira Gershwin’s working life. That has its interest, and as such it is a useful volume. As one might say of a Broadway show, if the ‘book’ is not so hot, at least the lyrics are memorable.

June 28, 2016

<<< At the moment [2007] I am listening to “Frank’s Place” on XM-Satellite Radio. Host Jonathan Schwartz just played a song written by his father, Arthur Schwartz: "I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan" from Sinatra’s A Swinging Affair, which he recorded in 1957, a year after Songs for Swinging Lovers. “Sinatra extended the life of this music by twenty-five years,” Jonathan says. Now he’s playing Rosemary Clooney singing Gershwin’s "Strike up the Band." And here's the Duke Ellington band with the maestro’s "Mood Indigo," very mellow, and here’s Sinatra in saloon mode with the same song.

A year has gone by and the show is now called “High Standards.” I wonder why the change. Maybe the Sinatra estate threatened to sue over taking Frank’s name in vain. Anyway, here is Mel Torme, "Dancing in the Dark," and Nelson Riddle, "Out of My Dreams," and Lena Horne, "Out of Nowhere," and Stacey Kent, "Zing Went the Strings of My Heart," and Sarah Vaughan, "My Heart Stood Still." And here is the Sinatra of 1946 with "Sweet Lorraine" as arranged by Sy Oliver with Nat Cole at the piano, Johnny Hodges on alto sax, and Coleman Hawkins on tenor. Jonathan brings a lot of imagination to his playlists. I remember, though it happened seven or eight years ago, the day he advanced the thesis that three Hammerstein lyrics – "Make Believe" (from Show Boat), "People Will Say We’re in Love" (from Oklahoma) and "If I Loved You" (from Carousel) -- were versions of the same idea. Each arose as a solution to the problem of creating a theatrically persuasive love duet between two persons who had not yet met, barely knew each other, or were feuding. Each relied on a conditional premise, a supposition or, in the case of "Make Believe," a frank suspension of disbelief. And though I love the Kern song best of the three, I think Schwartz is right in saying that the three exist in a progression, that "If I Loved You" is – from the theatrical point of view -- the best of the three, and that the “bench scene” in which it figures is the consummate example of the Rodgers & Hammerstein strategy.

In his autobiography Schwartz recalls the exact moment he became an ardent Frankophile. It was in the early 1950s and on a jukebox the young man heard Sinatra sing "The Birth of the Blues" (Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson). He says he played it a dozen times. And he's right, it is a fantastic performance, brilliant. Jonathan's fidelity to Sinatra is famous. One Sunday afternoon in December he plays a rare recording of Sinatra singing the Soliloquy from Carousel. It’s an unusually long, musically varied tear-jerker of a song in which the character, a ne’er-do-well carnival barker, imagines that the baby his wife is carrying will be a boy, enjoys the thought, realizes that it may be a girl, and finally vows to make or steal the money needed for the child’s upbringing, “or die.” Sinatra gives it all he has. It’s his birthday, December 12. He has been dead now for nine years. The song ends: “Or die.” There ensues a hush. Then Jonathan says, “I know you’re listening,” and I get the strong feeling that he is talking not to the radio audience but to Sinatra.

In 1986 Schwartz won a Grammy for Best Album Notes, which he wrote for FS's The Voice -- The Columbia Years, 1942-1952. One recent afternoon Schwartz plays "Frenesi," "Perfidia," and "Amapola" back to back to back: three songs with one-word foreign titles. You remember "Amapola," don’t you? Years later it would serve Sergio Leone as a recurrent motif throughout his Jewish gangster epic, Once Upon a Time in America (1984), a cinematic masterpiece, with James Woods and Robert De Niro. When Sinatra went to the White House in the fall of 1944, the President asked Frankie what would be number one on the hit parade that week and promised he would keep it secret. “Amapola,” Frank said, and for an instant FDR looked a bit confused. Was the singer speaking Italian? Sinatra was so skinny that after he left Roosevelt chuckled. So that’s what the girls are going for these days. In my time they liked a little more flesh on the bone. You didn’t know Sinatra got invited to the White House? What’s more he had an audience with the pope. It was a year later, after the war, when Sinatra was making his first trip abroad to entertain the troops. He was traveling with Phil Silvers. Singing and dancing, the future Sergeant Ernie Bilko had supplied the comic relief to the romantic leads Gene Kelly and Rita Hayworth in Cover Girl (1944). I bet you didn’t know that Phil Silvers wrote the lyrics for the Sinatra standard "Nancy (with the Laughing Face)." Well, he was a great pal of Sinatra, and the two of them - so goes the story -- were on their way to see Pope Pius XII in the Vatican. “Wait till I see that Pope,” Sinatra said. He was going to give him a piece of his mind about Father Coughlin’s anti-Semitic rants in Detroit. Of course when he entered the papal presence he thought better of it, and when the pope asked him what he sang he replied earnestly with a list of song titles starting with "Ol’ Man River." Now it was the pope’s turn to look puzzled. By “what do you sing” he had meant to ask whether the singer was a tenor, a baritone, or a bass.>>>>

June 25, 2016

My week as guest author has come to a close, and it seems quite fitting to take my leave after leaving you with David Lehman's poem "Radio" to read and listen to. For such a short poem it accomplishes quite a lot. Its brief lines read with ease and clarity and as an invitation of sorts---and somehow you end up right alongside the author as he enters a space filled with music and memory and perhaps a hint of something beyond the reach of language.

When I asked David about the poem and how it came to be he said:

I wrote it on a day in late May 2002 upon returning home from an outing to a book sale. I had left the radio on and the notes floated out of the darkness of the bedroom as I entered it. Key to the poem: title of the song: "After You've Gone." Great song from the 1920s. . . And the self-imposed limitation of three words per line.

Radio

I left iton when Ileft the housefor the pleasureof coming backten hours laterto the greatnessof Teddy Wilson"After You've Gone"on the pianoin the cornerof the bedroomas I enterin the dark

June 24, 2016

“Coming events cast their shadows before” wrote the English poet Thomas Campbell—and according to Alfred Lindsay Morgan in his March 1949 Etude article “Winter’s End Radio Programs At Their Height”, “Radio belies the frequently quoted line...to be sure coming events are anticipated, but the best are strengthened by what has gone before. We remember a program enjoyed and chalk it down in our memory. How strong a part memory plays in the turning of the dials is proved by changing program ratings. When remembered pleasures are not consistently substantiated in repetition of favorite broadcasts, disappointment is manifest.”

Disappointment is manifest. It seems fitting that by chance I grabbed this particular issue and flipped through the pages landing on this article—given my previous posts which evoke a looking back of sorts, questioning whether we have forfeited more than we have profited from so-called progress. But in truth, the first thing that came to mind when reading Morgan’s article was, and please don’t laugh (or please do), NETFLIX.

Even in 1949 people were complaining about programming and demanding that their favorite shows be restored and put back on the air. I imagine no matter the date or time or century, there has been a practice of recalling how it was done before, resurrecting memories of the good old days. When it was better, easier, simpler.

For some reason I immediately thought of House of Cards—a show I watched and looked forward to seeing again, and admittedly sooner rather than later. But what I am recalling (vaguely) is one of its season's release dates had people up in arms and demanding it be released even sooner. A few characters shy of a social movement, it seemed.

Also, there is now another wonderful word to add to what I called in a previous post our “somewhat collective lexicon”—a showhole. Amazon created an ad that explains the term with the visual of a woman curled up, wrapped in a blanket on her couch in a state of clinical despair as the final credits roll on her favorite show. Then it cuts to her shoveling dirt on top of her TV, as in why bother having one if you can no longer watch your favorite series ad infinitum?

Though perhaps a troubling commentary on present day existence, it is actually very funny.

Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdj9k4jsw-c

But back to 1949 and Alfred Lindsay Morgan who was quite up in arms himself about how radio programming was going down the tubes. In that first paragraph he writes, “One poor program can greatly alter audience appeal. So, to paraphrase the poet’s line, in radio “Events that have cast their shadows before” are most eagerly awaited. For him, he laments the “now defunct broadcasts of the Philadelphia, Boston and Cleveland Orchestras, and that inimitable Columbia musical offering of the past—“Invitation to Music.” He continues:

“The lack of sponsors has removed too many fine programs…There is just reason for critic Virgil Thomson’s recent assertion in the New York Herald Tribune that radio, in general, ‘is gravely misusing its privileges with regard to serious music and skimping its obligations.’”

So, even over half a century ago good programming was being thwarted by lack of sponsors, or to get down to it, the thing that often trumps all—profit. Are our favorite shows cancelled due to philosophical differences between the director and the executive producer? Once in a while, maybe.

Lamentations aside, what were some of these fine programs listeners had the privilege to hear?

Saturday broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, the NBC Symphony, and the New York Philharmonic. At least, says Morgan, these were still in place.

“Just when many of us were despairing that no programs in adult music education would be forthcoming this year, the National Broadcasting Company announced its seventeen-week “Pioneers of Music” series, new step in home-study phase of the “University of the Air.”

Again, it seems the showhole variety of despair can trace its roots to 1949—but instead of a vast inventory of shows and films streaming to appease the distraught viewer there was, among other programs, “Pioneers of Music”. A program that was arranged under the guidance of USC’s College of Music in an attempt to “provide organized education for people at home everywhere in the United States.” I am certainly not an historian, and have little knowledge of the radio’s history, but it still surprised me to learn that such home-study programs were in place mid-19th century. Today, of course, you can earn a doctoral degree with a few hundred clicks or taps.

The idea behind this series was “to trace the evolution of orchestral music from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the present.” It also included weekly study guides and other materials which would be submitted to USC and then returned to each student.

The cost was ten dollars for 17 weeks of music and study. 59 cents a week.

The article ends with a description of other programs to come which included Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony for a total of 8 concerts. Turns out Toscanini “made his now legendary first appearance as conductor at the age of nineteen.”

It seems at the time he was a cellist with a touring Italian opera company that was performing in Rio de Janeiro, but due to a “temperamental conductor” who abandoned the company and a lack of replacement options, Toscanini was asked to take his place on the podium with baton in hand.

“He did, conducting the entire opera without opening the score. His ovation was tremendous. This fortunate chance, for which the young musician was well prepared, launched him on his brilliant career.”

Pretty remarkable.

***

So, in bringing it all back home (Bob Dylan, 1965), I suppose it is only natural, at times, to mourn what has been lost, to sorely miss the ways things once were—but perhaps not an altogether bad idea to consider what great opportunities are still available to us that do not necessitate liking and clicking and tapping.

June 23, 2016

The next two posts pick up where I left off during a prior week as guest author. I once again dug out my old Etude magazines and once again was not disappointed. The language found in these older magazines is at once a quick and easy source of amusement but also fairly decent cultural food for thought in 2016, almost a century later.

“Why Not Give An Etude Radio Recital” read the title of an article in the January 1934 issue of The Etude music magazine. Why not indeed? Frankly, I became intrigued to read on just after seeing the words radio and recital in the piece’s title. I am so often on some kind of unproductive tear about the shortage of letter writing, or any kind of writing by hand, and the sinking feeling that we are collectively being swallowed up by devices made of plastic, chips and batteries—that the idea of listening to a recital on the radio sounded novel and exciting. I realize the radio was a device of its own and a precursor to those that envelop us now, but the kind we are talking of here were not yet pocket-sized. Not yet, anyway. In many homes, during its Golden Age, the radio was the apparatus that connected listeners to the world-at-large whether through the broadcasting of news, musical programs, radio plays, poetry reading, talent shows, or the great wide world of sports.

The author of this piece, Theon La Marr, certainly does his very (though hardly subtle) best to convey just how exciting, enlightening, educational, practical, rewarding, essential, captivating and fun these radio recitals can be, for music teachers and pupils alike. It seems he also feels all of mankind should be tuning in. Apparently, The Etude was offering regular programs on the radio, one of which La Marr describes in a section called “What Makes Radio Valuable”:

“Ladies and gentlemen of the radio audience. We shall have the pleasure during the next period of listening to a recital of compositions taken from the Music Section of THE ETUDE MUSIC MAGAZINE for July, 1933, and played by pupils of Theon La Marr, who is making this announcement. You who are listening over this marvel of marvels must realize that, if it were not for music, the charms of the radio would be reduced about ninety per cent. The radio needs music just as much as the earth needs sunshine and rain. It is difficult to imagine the radio without music.”

The article reveals that part of the program included the Album Leaf by Debussy, followed by more zealous commentary from La Marr.

“A happy frame of mind is a priceless possession and music possibly more than anything else tends to promote this condition. Therefore, music and industry, music and life, should always go hand in hand. Thousands have acclaimed THE ETUDE MUSIC MAGAZINE invaluable to them in helping to preserve this condition. Are you among those who cannot get along without this magazine? If you are a lover of music or if you have children who are studying music you can ill afford not to have THE ETUDE in your home.” (Here the music comes to an end.)”

No one could argue that La Marr was not a fan of The Etude and perhaps his certitude and hyperbolic style of speaking is a bit much. And yet, even though people likely would have survived 1934 and the years to follow without monthly issues of The Etude, he delivers some valid notions about the importance of music, of industry, of a happy mindset (and music as a vehicle for this) and of radio (especially music on the radio). Notions that I imagine were appreciated and applauded then by faithful readers, and perhaps too by modern day readers looking back to an era when a radio program very well could be the highlight of the week, or even month.

This was also a time where receiving a magazine in the mail was cause for excitement, anticipating its arrival for weeks and eagerly flipping through its pages to see what was in the latest issue. And long before the invasion of the box, otherwise known as the television, radio programs offered listeners something to look forward to each day, week, or month. As much as I applaud his ardor for all things musical, it’s worth mentioning that La Marr might have been a tad biased in declaring that “if it were not for music, the charms of the radio would be reduced by ninety per cent.” 90 %? Listeners who were anxiously awaiting the next installment of The Green Hornet or The Lone Ranger might take issue with this. For starters.

But back on point, which is the overwhelming volume of art, music, literature, reality TV, film, world news, YouTube videos of pets or intoxicated celebrities standing on their heads or brushing their teeth—of anything and everything. Continuous exposure and access to this must have some impact on our level of excitement. If something is always in hand, one tap away, one second away, where does the anticipation go, as well as its first cousin, patience? The information and resources, musical, literary and otherwise that we now have more or less immediate access to, is, to be sure, a marvel of its own. And a formidable tool. But I wonder what Mr. La Marr might think of this marvel compared to the marvel he writes of.

In a section called “The Magic of Transmission” he writes this of the radio:

“First there is the mystery of the thing—how the sounds are shot out to the world over invisible channels. This captivates the pupil’s imaginations. “

Mystery. The mystery of the thing. Has that possibly fallen into the sinkhole too? Along with cursive writing, old school thank you notes (not thx on a text), anticipation, patience (waiting more than 3.5 minutes for someone to “like” your post on Facebook before becoming agitated) and dare I say it, curiosity?

Or am I being as hyperbolic as Theon La Marr? I wonder, are we curious about the mystery of our current things? I admit I would be hard-pressed to intelligently, or unintelligently, explain how my smart phone works. (I can picture my scientist father’s look of dismay.) I do, however, become rather curious when it stops working as it should, when icons suddenly disappear never to return, or when, God forbid, the screen goes blank.“The Future Tense” written by Teddy Wayne is a wonderfully written monthly New York Times column that uniquely addresses “the anxieties over our cultural and technological evolutions”.

Figurative sinkholes and technology aside, a radio recital or even a good old-fashioned piano recital sounds good to me. And thank God they still have those around, and I do have to wait to see Sir Andras Schiff, at least in person, and on an actual stage, in real time. This past October I sat in my seat at Carnegie Hall waiting with a child’s enthusiasm to hear the first measure of Schiff’s Haydn to be played.

And, less enthusiastically, for the first phone to ring.

I’m happy to report that not one phone rang and Schiff responded to his admiring, non-phone ringing audience with a beautiful encore performance of the opening aria from the Goldberg Variations. Being physically able to attend this concert, for me, was meaningful for a host of reasons---and a reminder too that whether it is 1934 or 2015, an evening like this can be the highlight of one's day, month or year. All of the above in my book.

June 10, 2016

As a boy in Minnesota, Robert Zimmerman listened to a Minnesota girl sing the ballads of Harold Arlen and thought he could travel down the road taken by Dorothy and the Scarecrow. By the time he took up the guitar and changed his name to Bob Dylan, he had wandered so far into Woody Guthrie territory that a reader confronting an article in The Nation entitled “Woody, Dylan, and Doubt” could be forgiven for thinking that it concerned the singer’s relation to Arlo Guthrie’s papa on the one side and the condition of epistemological uncertainty on the other when in fact the piece addresses allegations that Woody Allen had misbehaved with his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow.

Judy Garland had to endure many indignities in her star-crossed career but the heartache of child abuse wasn’t one of them. Born to sing America’s all-time favorite movie song, Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow,” Judy was as natural a Gemini as you will find – totally binary, loyal to a fault yet fickle, happy and proud yet sometimes suicidally desperate, given to coming late to the set fortified by drinking bottles of “Blue Nun,” “Liebfraumilch,” and similar white stuff, which tasted terrible but did the job.

On June 10, 1922, Judy Garland was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at 6 AM. With her moon in Sagittarius, and her Mercury and Venus in Cancer (her rising sign), the great singer had the heart of a poet, the sensitivity of an eternal diva, and a really good voice. If only there had been more Virgo in her chart, the girl who embodied Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” might have had greater career endurance. The absence of earth signs doomed her to a nervous disposition and the likelihood of an early death.

Born Frances Ethel Gumm, Judy craved the approval of father figures, was easily bruised by criticism, sometimes affected nonchalance but really cared very deeply about other people and wanted to be included in group activities. Her Saturn in Libra helps to explain her outstanding musical talent, and her will to succeed in motion pictures may be inferred from her midheaven in Pisces conjunct Uranus.

The death of Judy's father at age thirteen stunned the young actress, who eventually broke off relations with her mother. The amphetamines helped in the short run. She had five husbands.

An old astrological adage: The stars favor the stars. From the moment the teenage Garland sang to Clark Gable's photograph ("You Made Me Love You"), her astonishing rise to the heights of Hollywood glory was in the cards (Queen of Hearts high) as was, alas, the inevitability of internal conflicts and demons postponed but not resolved by the habitual use of narcotics. She was still in her teens when she and Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr sang as they danced along the yellow brick road leading to the wonderful wizard of Oz. That was in Technicolor. Already in the black-and-white of Kansas cornfields, she sang the anthem of eternal aspiration, “Over the Rainbow,” which was named the greatest song of the twentieth century in a survey conducted bythe National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America in 2001. She teamed up with Mickey Rooney and their versions of “Our Love Affair” and “How About You?” are the best out there. She did “The Trolley Song” in one picture and “The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” in another. She would have made a great Annie Oakley in Irving Berlin’s “Annie, Get Your Gun,” and we still have tape of the one song she did (“Doin’ a What Come Naturally”), but she was too fucked up to do the movie and the part went to Betty Hutton.

In Chinese astrology, Judy was born in the year of the dog. Her element is water. This is consistent with her destiny. Her relation to Minnesota mirrors that of Dorothy to Kansas except that there was no home to go back to. The three farm hands in the dream were almost recognizably there, surrounding her bed, when she awoke in Hollywood. Why did gay men have a thing about her? Because (a) they had good taste, (b) they could identify with her suffering, (c) they could admire her indomitable will, (d) they could smell the tragedy on her breath, (e) even macho boys could identify themselves with Dorothy Gale, (f) where gossip and conjecture overlap, anything goes, or (g) all, some, or none of the above. And remember: she was the mother of Liza Minelli, and all you need to do is see the 2014 revival of Cabaret (2014), good as it is, and compare Michelle Williams’s performance as Sally Bowles with that of Liza in the 1972 movie, and you will see the difference between an actress who is trying as hard as she can and a natural-born diva, with the vocal cords of a heroine and the soul of Judy Garland’s daughter.

In the 1960s Judy was hell on wheels to work with, if Mel Torme’s account in The Other Side of the Rainbow is to be trusted. Mel Torme was the music director on her short-lived television program, “The Judy Garland Show” on CBS, and Torme says she tormented him. Judy would call you in the middle of the night, make you come over and hold her hand, make capricious decisions, stand up guest stars like Lena Horne, skip rehearsals, tell fart jokes on the set. On the other hand she was who she was, and you loved her when she lifted her glass and said “l’chayem.” She was so earnest you couldn’t help pull for her. “This television jazz is all new to me,” she said. “The Blue Lady helps to get my heart started.” She couldn’t stand what she called the Smothers’ Brothers “goyishe humor,” and the show had other guests of that ilk. But when Barbra Streisand was the guest star, it was incredible. The two divas did a duet of “Get Happy” and “Happy Days Are Here Again” that you can listen to over and over again – it is the ideal rendering of two of the Depression’s enduring hits.

Judy sang and danced with Gene Kelly (“For Me and My Gal”) and with Fred Astaire (“Easter Parade”), and the saints of St. Louis marched in and sang "The Trolley Song" in unison on June 22, 1969, the day of her death. At Carnegie Hall in 1961, with composer Harold Arlen in the audience, she sang "Get Happy," "Stormy Weather," "The Man That Got Away," and "Come Rain or Come Shine." Five Grammy awards! She was dead at 46.

If Judy and Frank Sinatra had been lovers, they would have scored very high in passion, high in intimacy, average in synergy, and below average in commitment.

June 01, 2016

We don't think of her as a singer, but Marilyn Monroe (whose birthday is today), sang. Unlike Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak in Pal Joey, Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story, and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, she needed no dubbing. (In another column I will salute the wonderful voices that emerge from Mesdames Hayworth, Novak, Kerr, Wood, and Hepburn in those flicks. Say, does anyone say "flicks" anymore?) See Marilyn making the most of a secondary role in Niagara, or teaming with Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, or joining Mitzi Gaynor and Donald O'Connor on the Irving Berlin bandwagon in There's No Business Like Show Business, or cavorting with cross-dressers Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot. She sings in each of these movies and the songs are noteworthy, each and all. The way she pronounces the "z" in Berlin's "Lazy," for example, or the electricity when she strolls among the nightclub plutocrats and sagely notes that "after you get what you want you don't want it. / I could give you the moon, / you'd be tired of it soon. / You're like a baby, / that wants what it wants when it wants it, / ah, but when you are presented / with what you want you're discontented." (Irving Berlin never fails to amaze me.) This lyric was made to order for Miss Monroe.

Some songs with male chorus and big brass solos, such as "Heat Wave," are extravaganzas of sexual desire and energy. There's a heat wave coming in from the south and you can't keep your eyes of the north of her body even as your brain wanders to the tropics. "The way that she moves / the thermometer proves / that she certainly can can-can." No, you can't keep your eyes off her, all of her, which is as it should be, but one consequence is that you don't hear enough of the voice. Listen to her do "I'm Through with Love," or "I Wanna Be Loved By You," "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" or "Bye Bye, Baby" -- but listen to the songs without looking at the visuals. You'll hear a melodious voice of limited range, thin but accurate, with a husky low register, a breathy manner, and a rare gift of vibratro. When her voice trembles over a note -- over "you" or "baby" -- the effect is seductive and yet is almost a caricature of the seductress's vamp. The paradox of her singing is that she reveals her sexual power and flaunts her vulnerability -- to flip the usual order of those verbs. She can be intimate and ironic at the same time.

Compare MM's version of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" (in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) with Carol Channing's definitive Broadway treatment, and you get the essential difference between theater and cinema, New York and Hollywood. Channing's is the superior theatrical experience: funny, charming, a show-stopper of the first order. But Channing serves the song where Monroe makes her songs sound like illustrations of her life. Monroe's treatment of "Diamonds" may not be as effective as Channing's in its service to Leo Robin's marvelous lyric for Jules Styne's delightful tune. But Monroe's version is younger, friskier, sexier. When she sings it, the song is about her. Music is the food of love, and sexual ecstasy is on the menu, for dessert.

Nowhere is she better than "I'm Through with Love," which she sings in Some Like It Hot. Gus Kahn's lyric, which rhymes "I'm through" with "adieu," is as apt for Marilyn as "Falling in Love Again" was for Marlene Dietrich. In "I'm Through with Love," the singer feigns nonchalance, affects an uncaring attitude. But melodically during the bridge, and lyrically in the line "for I must have you or no one," the song lets us know just how much she does care. Monroe implies this pathos in "I'm Through with Love" at the same time as she struts her stuff. She vows that she'll "never fall again" and commands Love -- as if the abstraction stood for a Greek god or for the entire male sex -- to cease and desist; don't "ever call again." But we don't quite believe her, because we know temptation is just around the corner. In a sense, her voice thrusts out its hips when she sings. It's a feast for all the senses. -- DL

May 24, 2016

I am writing in response to today’s front-page article asking when the time is right for an old geezer past his prime to get off the stage. The piece begins with a scathing account of a recent concert by Bob Dylan. You illustrated it with a cartoon of Dylan with a prune juice bottle at his elbow.

My first reaction was yeah. I was at that concert. I’ll never pay to hear him anymore. And it was expensive. The cost to pleasure ratio was way out of whack. However, then I considered the unexamined premise behind the piece, which is that age brings infirmity and loss of prowess without a compensatory gift, in this case the beautiful nobility of Mr. Dylan’s professional presence. I’d rather have a croaking Bob Dylan than 90% of what’s out there.

And how typically inconsistent for the Wall Street Journal to say in one breath that Dylan at 69 is too old to perform and in the next breath that we should extend the retirement age to 69.

As a free-market capitalist I feel that Dylan should retire when the market says he should.

April 21, 2016

The Reverend John B. Matthias was born on the first day of 1767. He eventually joined the clergy of the Methodist Episcopal Church and, like other ministers of the church, he became a circuit rider traveling around his assigned territory serving those who lived there and starting new congregations. In 1836, he was serving the areas of South Huntington and Islip on Long Island, and it is then that he supposedly wrote a gospel song titled Palms of Victory (alternate titles are The Wayworn Traveler and Deliverance Will Come).

That, at least, is what is presumed. The song, unlike other hymns, doesn’t have the easily memorable lines associated with a composition that arose bit by bit from a community. So it seems to have sprung from the mind of one author, an author deeply influenced by John Bunyan’s religious classic The Pilgrim’s Progress. Nevertheless, in truth the authorship is unclear in part because the Reverend Matthias was not known as a songwriter and no other song is attributed to him. He died in 1848. His singular achievement in songwriting was not widely known or used in church circles.

But it was recorded by various singers, most famously by the Carter Family, Uncle Dave Macon, and Ralph Stanley.

It is not clear how or when Bob Dylan heard the song, but its melody certainly impressed him. The most plausible explanation is that Dylan heard the Carter Family’s version which used the title Wayworn Traveler. He probably wrote his song Paths of Victory around July 1963. What Dylan did to the song was interesting. He took a traditional gospel song and made it secular. Even more particularly, he made it political. In Dylan’s hands, the song became an anthem of hope for those engaged in social action, not a song to nourish believers.

On August 12, 1963, Dylan was in the studio for a recording session for his third album. None of the songs recorded that day, including Paths of Victory, was considered good enough to be included on the album. Dylan then took a break, briefly traveling with Joan Baez and performing in a number of concerts. Evidently in the time gap between sessions for the album, Dylan re-considered Paths of Victory. He had a new vision and transformed it, reworking the verses in a whole new, much more sophisticated, way, changed the time signature to ¾, and had a new song, the one that became the remarkable song that gave its name to the album’s title: The Times They Are a-Changin’. He recorded the song on October 24, 1963. Paths of Victory is included on Dylan’s Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 released in 1991.

Once Dylan, seeking artistic freedom, separated himself from those who wished to have him keep writing protest songs, he soon found himself caught in an emotional and spiritual maelstrom. Seeking a new form of shelter from this emotional storm, he experimented with religion, family, and rural values before settling on a more or less consistent religious view. For the past decades, this religious lodestar has, with moments of deep doubt and confusion along the way, guided Bob Dylan on his Earthly journey.

What he did then was exactly the opposite of what he did with Paths of Victory. Instead of transforming religious songs into secular sounds, he took secular experiences and found religious meaning in them. Last year he sang songs Frank Sinatra performed. These songs were meant to be entirely secular, but in Dylan’s rendition, they have deep religious undertones. He may do the same on his forthcoming album of other songs Sinatra performed.

Such is the unique artistry of Bob Dylan.

A Personal Note: The Times They Are a-Changin’ was the first Bob Dylan song I ever heard. Without knowing of its connection to Paths of Victory, I used to play Paths every day during the writing of one of my books.

April 15, 2016

On the night of April 16-17, 1941, the Luftwaffe conducted a raid over London. Several hours after midnight, two bombs fell into Jermyn Street, causing extensive damage and killing 23 people. One of the victims, a well-known professional entertainer named Al Bowlly, had declined the offer of overnight lodgings in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, after having performed there the previous evening, preferring to catch the last train home. He was in bed reading when the parachute bomb went off outside his apartment building. His bedroom door, blown off its hinges by the force of the explosion, was propelled across the room, hitting him in the face and killing him instantly. He was 42 years old.

Al Bowlly, January 7, 1898 – April 17, 1941

Though he is still well remembered in Britain, Al Bowlly’s name is not widely known here. Many know it only as a reference in the title and lyrics of Richard Thompson’s song “Al Bowlly’s in Heaven” (from which my title is taken), on his 1986 album Daring Adventures. Yet, for every American who knows his name, there are scores who have heard Al Bowlly’s music. His recording of Noël Coward’s “Twentieth Century Blues” was used over the main titles of the 1968 BBC miniseries (shown here on PBS in 1972) made from Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point. Stanley Kubrick used Bowlly’s “Midnight, the Stars and You” and “It’s All Forgotten Now” in The Shining (1980), and Steven Spielberg featured his “South of the Border (Down Mexico Way)” in Empire of the Sun (1987). Al Bowlly songs have been used in films as recent as The King’s Speech (2010) and Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight (2014). Everything Is Copy, Jacob Bernstein’s documentary film about his mother, Nora Ephron, which premiered on HBO premiere only four weeks ago, concludes with Bowlly’s “Love Is the Sweetest Thing” playing over the closing credits.

But beyond all doubt, the one person most responsible for keeping the name and music of Al Bowlly alive was the late Dennis Potter, whose enthusiasm for the singer bordered on the obsessive. In fact, Potter’s 1969 teleplay Moonlight on the Highway (the title of a 1938 Bowlly recording) starred Ian Holm as a sexual abuse victim whose own obsession with Bowlly becomes a psychological coping mechanism. Potter made use of Bowlly’s music in several other television dramas and serials, including his last major work, The Singing Detective (1986), but it is Pennies from Heaven (1978), the six-part series that is universally acknowledged to be Potter’s masterpiece, that makes the most prominent use of Al Bowlly’s records, fourteen songs in all. Long before we knew one another, my wife, Vicky, watched it when it was broadcast on PBS and was overwhelmed by both the drama and the music—so much so that she flew from New York to London shortly thereafter, partly to visit her then-favorite city, but principally to find, in those pre-Amazonian days, the otherwise unobtainable soundtrack LP. Years later, it was through her insistence that I watch the series that I discovered Al Bowlly.

A shilling life—there have been several[1]—will give you all the facts, and so, nowadays, will a number of Internet sources. Born to Lebanese and Greek parents in Mozambique, Albert Alick Bowlly grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa. Though trained as a barber, he spent his middle twenties touring various Asian countries as a singer with several bands. In 1927 he made his way to Germany, of all places, and in Berlin on August 18 of that year he made the first of what would be more than one thousand recordings, a performance of Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies” (which, like a good deal of his work, is available on YouTube). The start of the 1930s brought his breakthrough, when he began recording with the superb Ray Noble Orchestra and singing live with the band at the Monseigneur Restaurant, led first by Roy Fox, later—and brilliantly—by Lew Stone. The first half of that decade saw more than half of his entire recorded output. At the time, singers tended to be anonymous members of the bands with which they performed, but he became so popular that his name began to be featured on show posters and record labels. His wave crested in mid-decade, and after two years in the United States and recurring vocal problems, he wound up touring throughout Britain and recording when he could with a variety of orchestras. But, complicating the inevitable speculation about what would have happened if he had not been killed, the quality of his work remained undiminished. Among his most striking records are jazz settings of two Shakespeare songs, “Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind” and “It Was a Lover and His Lass,” which he cut with Ken “Snakehips” Johnson and His West Indian Orchestra a year before his death.

The best treatment of Bowlly’s art that I know of is the long entry in Will Friedwald’s Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers (2010), a vast, opinionated, astonishingly informed, and frequently hilarious compendium. Friedwald calls Bowlly “one of the finest swinging jazz singers of any era, and like Django Reinhardt, one of the first Europeans to understand the blues…. He also was, like Armstrong and Crosby, a clear predecessor of Sinatra’s Swingin’ Lover style.” Needless to say, in a catalogue of a thousand recordings[2], there are many that are not worth listening to a second time—or, in rare instances, even a first time. Bowlly recorded his share of throwaway ditties and banal ballads, and outside of his work with Noble and Stone and the sides he cut with his longtime piano accompanist Monia Liter, many otherwise fine performances are hampered by off-the-rack arrangements. Yet from the beginning to the end of his recording career, Bowlly’s singing is consistently excellent. His clear phrasing, unerring rhythm, and warm yet flinty voice are unmistakable on every number. Friedwald concludes: “Bowlly is simply one of the finest spirits ever captured on record. With his slightly husky timbre that anticipates Tony Bennett as much as it echoes Crosby, he is a genuine, three-dimensional personality that speaks to us across the generations on shellac surfaces that spin at 78 rpm. Journalists at the time tended to use the term ‘crooner’ and ‘jazz singer’ as if they were interchangeable. In later years, this was proven not to be apt, but, in Bowlly’s work, the two roles are one and the same.”

If you don’t know Al Bowlly’s music but your curiosity has now been piqued, I advise you to take this simple test. Go to YouTube and listen to the following: “All I Do Is Dream of You,” “Love Is the Sweetest Thing,” “Over the Rainbow,” and the stunning “My Woman.” It will take about ten minutes, and, in all likelihood, one of two things will happen. Either you will decide that you simply don’t carry the gene for Al Bowlly or else you will be instantly hooked, a lifelong fan. My money is on the second one.

[2] Several two-disc Bowlly sets are available on CD. The one in AVC’s Essential Collection series (2007) is the most comprehensive, and also has the highest proportion of top-drawer material. For those who want more, there is The Al Bowlly Collection (2013; four discs, 100 tracks).

February 15, 2016

Jazz standards and Hollywood movies of the 40s, usually in black and white, often in a noir mode, go together like streetlamps and shadows, seam stockings and high heels, fedoras and belted trench-coats, scotch and soda. They’re as right for each other as Rogers and Astaire -- or Rodgers and Hart. The pleasure in developing this thesis lies in furnishing apt illustrations. Let me give a few. You’ll note that certain names recur; they “keep coming back like a song,” to quote a lyric Irving Berlin wrote for Bing Crosby in 1946.

Max Steiner composed some exciting suspense music for The Big Sleep, Howard Hawks’s 1946 movie of Raymond Chandler’s novel. It is very effective, and so, in its way, is the swinging number Lauren Bacall and band perform at the casino run by racketeer Eddie Mars: And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine (music Stan Kenton and Charles Lawrence, lyrics Joe Greene). The lyric locates us in noir central: “She’s a real sad tomato, she’s a busted valentine.” But my favorite musical moment in The Big Sleep is subtle enough that you might not notice it the first time around. Bacall (as one of the notorious Sternwood sisters) and co-star Humphrey Bogart (as detective Philip Marlowe) are bantering in a restaurant. In the background, a piano player is playing two great jazz standards: I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan (music Arthur Schwartz, lyrics Howard Dietz) and Blue Room (music Richard Rodgers, lyrics Lorenz Hart). At first you might think that what you’re hearing is just tremendously appealing café music. Only later do you realize that the two songs themselves have captured, in a whimsical fashion, the structural meaning of the scene.

The Big Sleep will culminate in the image of two lighted cigarettes in an ashtray as the words THE END appear on the screen. It’s a fitting image for the romance of Bogart and Bacall, who like to smoke and drink and make witty repartee in a roadhouse café. The by-play between the two romantic leads is utterly charming, but it is also, for much of the picture, utterly incongruous because incompatible with the story-line. The movie needs them to be lovers, the audience expects them to flirt, to link, and to clinch, and this duly happens, but at considerable violence to the logic of the plot, which puts their characters on the opposite sides of a quarrel.

Though this duality may threaten the coherence of the picture, it makes the scenes between Bogart and Bacall doubly entertaining. The dialogue is full of double meanings and playful digressions. In the restaurant scene with the piano soundtrack, the two are nursing their drinks. They employ an extended racetrack metaphor to communicate their sexual interest. She: “Speaking of horses, I like to play them myself. But I like to see them work out a little first, see if they're front-runners or come from behind, find out what their hole-card is. What makes them run.” He invites her to take a stab at summing him up. “I’d say you don't like to be rated. You like to get out in front, open up a lead, take a little breather in the backstretch, and then come home free.” He: “You don't like to be rated yourself.” She: “I haven't met anyone yet that can do it. Any suggestions?” He: “Well, I can't tell till I've seen you over a distance of ground. You've got a touch of class, but I don't know how far you can go.” She: “A lot depends on who's in the saddle.”

The ostensible purpose of the encounter is for Bacall to pay Bogart off – to pay him for the work he has done and get him to drop the case. Thus: I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan. Once this plot requirement is out of the way, Bacall and Bogart get down to the real cinematic purpose of their being there: to tease and flirt and advance their budding romance. And now the piano player plays Blue Room, which idealizes the successful outcome of such a romance. Lorenz Hart’s lyric stars you and me and the prospect of our betrothal and a subsequent time ever after when “every day’s a holiday, because you’re married to me.” It’s a song second perhaps only to Tea for Two (music Vincent Youmans, words Irving Caesar) as an idealized fantasy of marriage so beautifully innocent it almost brings tears to your eyes.

The Big Sleep needs the two songs in the background, and not simply because they are in exact counterpoint to the course of the conversation between Bogart and Bacall. A soundtrack of popular songs by Rodgers and Hart, Schwartz and Dietz, Irving Berlin, and the other great masters of the thirty-two bar song is as necessary in noir movies of the 1940s as the city streets, the silhouette in the window, the Mickey disguised as a highball, and the night spots the characters frequent, from Rick’s Café Americain in Casablanca (1942) to Eddie Mars’s casino in The Big Sleep, where beautiful costumed girls check Bogart’s coat, offer to sell him cigarettes, and vie for the privilege of delivering him a message.

Nor do the songs suffer from being relegated to background music, shorn of lyrics. The solo piano renditions of I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan and Blue Room insinuate themselves in your consciousness. If you don’t recognize them, fine; if you know them, so much the better. When you listen to an instrumental version of a song whose lyrics you know and like, what you’re hearing is a metonymy of the song: a part standing for the whole. The text is not altogether absent if you the listener can supply it. (When the septuagenarian Frank Sinatra went up on the lines of The Second Time Around the audience helpfully sang them). But to make my point about the interdependence of Hollywood films and popular songs, let me offer this montage:

-- What better way to convey the faithful consistency of “iron man” Lou Gehrig, the Yankee first baseman who long held the record for most consecutive games played, than with Irving Berlin’s song Always? In Pride of the Yankees (1942), the song does double duty as the musical affirmation of Gehrig’s loving fidelity to his wife, Eleanor, played by Teresa Wright.

-- Johnny Mercer’s lyric for Tangerine (music Victor Schertzinger) extols the charms of a vain and fickle Latin beauty. To the strains of this song, Barbara Stanwyck plays the ultimate femme fatale in Double Indemnity (1944), who conspires with insurance man Fred McMurray to eliminate her husband. In a flashback in Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), the same song plays on the car radio when Stanwyck, playing a neurotic heiress this time, flaunts her father’s wealth to betray a friend and seduce Burt Lancaster. The great Jimmy Dorsey big band version of this song features Bob Eberle’s romantic solo followed by Helen O’Connell’s brassy satirical retort.

--- As David Raksin’s theme for Laura (1944) plays in the background, the homicide detective played by Dana Andrews becomes obsessed with the murder victim, a beautiful dame (Gene Tierney), whose picture hangs on the wall. Laura obligingly returns to life -- the corpse in the kitchen belonged to somebody else – and whenever in future we need to summon her up, we need only hum Raksin’s theme. Johnny Mercer added his lyric to the music months after the movie was released.

--- To Have and Have Not (1944) is notable for being the first movie pairing Bogart and Bacall. It’s the one in which the foxy young actress seduces the hardened skeptic by teaching him how to whistle: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.” The song she “sings” in the movie’s nightclub scene is How Little We Know (music Hoagy Carmichael, lyrics Johnny Mercer). There are three things to keep in mind about the scene. 1) It is the composer who is playing the piano. 2) The song is an under-appreciated gem in the Carmichael – Mercer canon; I like it almost as much as Skylark. 3) It is said that the young Andy Williams enhanced the voice coming out of the throat of Lauren Bacall. (4) Jacqueline Bouvier loved the song, and during her junior year in Paris, she wrote out the bridge in English and in her own French translation for the benefit of one of her French hosts.

-- In The Clock (1945) office worker Judy Garland meets soldier Robert Walker on a two-day leave in New York City. At the moment they realize they are falling in love, the piano player in the restaurant is playing If I Had You (music Ted Shapiro, lyrics James Campbell and Reginald Connolly).

--- Somebody puts a coin in the jukebox in the diner and out comes I Can’t Believe that You’re in Love with Me (music Jimmy McHugh, words Clarence Gaskill), triggering the recollected psychodrama in Edgar Ullmer’s strange reverie of an unreliable (unbelievable) narrator in Detour (1945). The movie is a paranoid masterpiece, and the very title of the song goes to the heart of its mystery. The viewer “can’t believe” the events he or she is witnessing, because the narrator is either delusional or a liar or both in some blend. The same song punctuates The Caine Mutiny, where it has a more conventional signification.

-- A drunken Fredric March still in uniform and his game wife Myrna Loy dance to Among My Souvenirs (music Horatio Nicholls, lyrics Edgar Leslie) on his first night back from the war in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Hoagy Carmichael tickles the ivories at the gin joint where the reunited couple have gone with their daughter (Teresa Wright) and returning airman Dana Andrews.

-- Rita Hayworth invites the American male in the form of tightlipped Glenn Ford to Put the Blame on Mame (music Doris Fisher, lyrics Alan Roberts) in Gilda (1946). In The Lady from Shanghai (1947), the same red-haired enchantress seduces Orson Welles and coyly sings Please Don’t Kiss Me (same songwriters), a phrase that says one thing and means its opposite. Given the way Hollywood films wink at one another, it’s no surprise that we hear an instrumental version of Put the Blame on Mame in the background when tough-guy Glenn Ford sets out to foil the killers in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953).

-- The radio reliably pours out love songs in keeping with the plot twists in Delmer Daves’s Dark Passage (1947). Humphrey Bogart plays an escaped convict with a new face who will escape to South America with Lauren Bacall if he can figure out who killed his pal and framed him for the murder. During the course of the movie we hear instrumentals of I Gotta a Right to Sing the Blues (music Harold Arlen, lyrics Ted Koehler), I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan (music Arthur Schwartz, lyrics Howard Dietz)\, and Someone to Watch Over Me (music George Gershwin, lyrics Ira Gershwin). “You like swing, I see,” says Bogart. “Yes, legitimate swing,” Bacall counters. When Dark Passage gets serious about the love story, we see a record spinning on Bacall’s record player and the golden voice of Jo Stafford sings Too Marvelous for Words (music Richard Whiting, lyrics Johnny Mercer) and legitimates the romance.

-- Manipulative Anne Baxter supplants Bette Davis as queen of the stage in All About Eve (1951), and the romantic Broadway ambiance of New York City is communicated in background instrumentals of all-star songs by Rodgers and Hart (Thou Swell, My Heart Stood Still), Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler (Stormy Weather), Arlen and Johnny Mercer (That Old Black Magic), and Ralph Freed and Burton Lane (How About You?). The last named begins, “I like New York in June.”

The use of Among My Souvenirs in The Best Years of Our Lives is exemplary. Edgar Leslie’s 1927 lyric communicates regret at the passing of time. Trinkets and tokens diligently collected and treasured offer some consolation but do nothing to stop the flow of tears. In the movie, when the U. S. army sergeant played by March comes home he brings souvenirs of the Pacific war as gifts for his teenage son. But like the knife in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Crusoe in England,” when it has become a souvenir on the shelf after Crusoe returns home from his island, the mementos of the global conflict have lost their meaning. They seem vaguely unreal, lifeless. In contrast, the photograph of his wife that a hung-over March looks at the next morning – another sort of souvenir – has all the meaning in the world for him. And Among My Souvenirs – played on the piano by Hoagy Carmichael, hummed in the shower by a drunken March, and heard as background music -- unifies the whole sequence and endows it with the rich pathos that make the song so durable a jazz standard. I recommend that you listen to Art Tatum play it on the piano or, if you can get your mitts on it, a recording of Sinatra and Crosby doing it as a duet on television in the 1950s

[A version of this essay appears in Boulevard, ed. Richard Burgin.] -- DL

February 12, 2016

My professional life for nearly four decades has consisted mainly of veering back and forth between poetry and music. In 1994, when I received a big award for my writing about classical music, I told an interviewer that I hoped that as a result more people would read my poems. That probably hasn’t happened. But over the years, my association with musicians has indeed led to some of them asking to set some of my poems, with always interesting if not always expected results. As a lover of classical vocal music—songs, lieder, chansons—I enjoy the way composers (Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Strauss, Debussy, Wolf, Carter) present their own take on poetry, sometimes even making the poems sound better than they read. And since no two composers have the same take, each musical setting expands our understanding of the poems. So I’m always pleased when a composer wants to set one of my poems, and curious about what my poem is going to sound like when music is added.

One early poem of mine, a dramatic monologue called “Hannah,” in the voice of a rare book librarian looking back over her life, was actually set by two different composers. Jeanne Singer’s setting was a kind of musical snuff-box, a lovely, tender image of an elegant person living in a refined, quasi-Mozartean past. On the other hand, Rodney Lister’s setting was a microtonal vision of a soul in torment, dissatisfied with and pained by the pressures of her repression, the strictures of refinement and elegance. I like both of these settings. They expand my own view of my poem, though neither one quite captured my own idea of Hannah’s strength and austerity, the self-abnegation that made her, in my mind, almost a character out of Henry James. Both were expressively sung by one of my favorite singers, mezzo-soprano Jane Struss. What if those two diametrically opposite settings could have been performed simultaneously?…

Maybe more directly on target, in 1996, composer and music professor David Patterson, my colleague at UMass Boston, set my poem “Dead-Battery Blues.” This was a poem I’d always explicitly hoped would eventually have music. I wanted it to be sung. And I thought Patterson caught both its irony and jazzy “tunefulness.” Like Jeanne Singer’s settings (To Stir a Dream, Cambria Records), it too found a home on CD (Saving Daylight Time, Albany Records), with a naughty-little-girl vocal and edgy syncopation by mezzo-soprano Valerie Anastasios.

In the summer of 2008, as I reported in these Best American Poetry pages , I got the irresistible invitation to participate in an educational project at Tanglewood, in which the six compositions fellows were each asked to choose one of my poems (one of my shorter ones!) to set to music—songs that would be sung and accompanied by Tanglewood vocal and instrumental fellows at a recital a few weeks later in the Tanglewood Chamber Music Hall. I would be serving as a source of information, an “expert” on the poetry, an almost literal sounding board, whose feedback could help them make decisions about their musical settings. My poems—some short lyrics as well as monologues and dialogues not strictly in a traditional lyric vein—would be challenging and (everyone hoped) exciting for the fellows.

There was a wide array of responses. Some settings, I thought, really got the poems, a couple completely ignored my own intentions (a very short sestina using only one word to a line—in the form of an argument—became a kind of demented monologue). One setting interwove one of my poems with a Shakespeare sonnet. It was all very rushed and very intense, and utterly exhilarating. It was illuminating to sit in on the coaching sessions. The singers and accompanists were getting the scores piecemeal, a page at a time. One impressive young bass came to a rehearsal with a new page of his song and paused and stumbled and backtracked after every note, trying to get the microtonal pitches right. One of the coaches was the beloved soprano Dawn Upshaw who told him what every poet wants to hear: “Concentrate on the poetry! The pitches will come eventually, but you need to focus on what the words themselves convey.”

A year later, on another happy occasion, a fund-raising concert for Boston’s Emmanuel Music at the Boston jazz club Scullers, there was an evening of songs by the Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Grant-winning composer John Harbison, who in his earlier days had composed a bunch of pop songs unknown to most of the admirers of his “serious” music. Harbison’s idiomatic familiarity with jazz and pop music played an important role in his most ambitious opera, The Great Gatsby, with its multi-layered party sequences (think Don Giovanni in the 1920s). I had even tried to write a song lyric inspired by his fox-trotting Remembering Gatsby, a concert piece that became the overture to the opera.

So when Harbison asked two of his poet friends to contribute lyrics for a couple of new songs he would write for the occasion, I was already prepared. I sent him the lyric I originally wrote with Gatsby in mind. But instead of a fox-trot, Harbison turned it into a gorgeous, seductive beguine—utterly different from what I had imagined, though he had to leave out a couple of lines that didn’t fit the new rhythm. The other new song was a raucous country-and-western number called “Stand By Your Grievance,” to an uninhibited lyric by Louise Glück. I hope these get recorded someday. In the meantime, Harbison has set two more of my short poems (including a new version of one that one of the Tanglewood fellows had set). The one I’ve heard, “In the Mist,” sung by mezzo-soprano LynnTorgove, is hauntingly evocative, and though I’ve seen the score of the other, I haven’t heard it yet and can’t wait.

The most ambitious setting of my poems is a new sequence by the 30-year-old Arab-American composer Mohammed Fairouz, who—like Harbison and several other American composers I particularly admire (Elliott Carter, Yehudi Wyner)—is, as he describes himself, “obsessed with text.” Fairouz has set eleventh-century homoerotic Arabic poems as well as poems by Rudyard Kipling, Seamus Heaney, W.H. Auden, and a number of younger contemporary poets. On a CD called Follow, Poet, released on Deutsche Grammophon last year, Paul Muldoon reads Heaney’s “Audenesqe”—sung by the inspired Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey—and Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.”

I’d been impressed with Fairouz’s music, and was pleased and curious when he requested to set some poems of mine. His first choice was a translation I did of one of the Brazilian poet Affonso Romano Sant’Anna’s poems about visiting Iran during the Green Movement uprising of 2009 (“On the Rooftops of Iran”). Fairouz used it as one movement, a moment of calm, in his ferocious epic piece Furia.

Then he turned to a quieter subject. When his beloved grandmother died in 2009, he looked to the poems I wrote about my late mother in my book Cairo Traffic, and chose three of them for an intimate song cycle for voice (happily, Kate Lindsey) and cello (Adrian Daurov), which was his grandmother’s favorite instrument.

As my mother began to lose her memory, incidents from her past kept bubbling up with startling vividness. One such memory came from her early childhood in a Russian shtetl. Her father was a harness maker and she was watching his horses in the river when their reins got caught around a pole. The horses might have drowned had she not run to fetch her father. I wanted to write a poem in which she tells that story in her own voice. And when I told her about my poem-in-progress, that conversation, one of our most tender, inspired its own poem. “He Tells His Mother What He’s Working On” comes closer than anything else I’ve written to suggest what our relationship was like: loving, playful, how she was always a kind of muse (and maybe knew that), and how much my poems have tried to preserve her sensibility. My first title for this poem was “Ars Poetica.”

My mother’s moments of greatest lucidity always left me with an anguished hope that more of her mind might be restored; that, like Orpheus, I could help bring her back from a Land of the Dead. But of course I was no Orpheus, and I never overcame my bewilderment about how hard I should try to help her—or force her—to regain her memory. Her identity. Who was she if she had no past? And if she had no past, what could be her future? Of course, there was no solution. Yet once again, my mother was inspiring me to write. And once again, this new poem, “No Orpheus,” is filled with some of the uncanny things—the poetry—of what she actually said: “I’m a stranger to myself”; “I’m an unstationary pedestal”; “My marbles are slowly rolling away.” And because Fairouz is a composer creating the music for these words, he called the whole cycle No Orpheus.

Finally, in “Her Waltz,” the third poem Fairouz chose to set, my mother is confiding to me her dream—a dream that both frightens and delights her, and allows her to laugh at herself (even at her most lost she was never less than self-aware). Her natural elegance, a kind of innate aristocracy, manifests itself especially in her final words—her oddly comical and poignantly formal farewell: “And now I shall bid you goodnight.”

In uniting these three poems for his song cycle, Mohammed Fairouz created a distilled narrative within the narrative—a portrait of my mother at her most charming and lucid, and of her son at his most amused and most desperate, and allowing her the last sibylline word. In the first song, the natural and colloquial dialogue in the poem becomes a kind of recitative, attuned to the inflections of the conversation (I’m particularly tickled by the ominous plunge into the lower register when my mother recalls that one of her cousins fell down a well—“a deep well”). In the middle song, the central song (Fairouz calls it an aria), it feels as if the composer has entered my subconscious mind, emphasizing—even revealing—my underlying desperation and urgency. And the last song is (what else?) a waltz, with wonderful extended melismas on the words “waltz” and “waltzing.” Here is my mother being taken seriously by someone who never knew her, a composer who captures her warmth and honesty, her slyness and directness.

The world premiere of No Orpheus, with Kate Lindsey, was at New York’s Tenri Center, in June 2010, and it has received a number of performances since then. Now there’s an exciting new development. Naxos Records decided to produce an album of Fairouz’s vocal music, with Kate Lindsey singing No Orpheus as the centerpiece—the album to be called No Orpheus (another possible title was Refugee Blues, referring to Fairouz’s setting of Auden, but everyone seemed to agree that NoOrpheus would be the more intriguing title for an album of vocal music). The other musical settings include texts by Poe (“Annabel Lee”), Yeats (“The Stolen Child”), Wordsworth (“We Are Seven”—another poem about childhood), Alma Mahler (excerpts from her journals), Wayne Koestenbaum’s “oblique and eccentric” (his words) “German Romantic Song,” and erotic poems by two medieval Arabic writers, Ibn Shuhayd and Ibn Khafajah.

Part of the process of making the recording became, for me, one of the most extraordinary experiences—the phone conversations I had with Kate Lindsey about my poems. Let me say how especially delighted I was that she was going to be the singer for No Orpheus. That notable summer of 2008 at Tanglewood, one of the major events was the centennial celebration of Elliott Carter (with the celebrated centenarian actually present). Lindsey was singing Carter’s latest vocal cycle, In the Distances of Sleep, with poems by Wallace Stevens (he’d already set Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, and had a scintillating cycle featuring major 20th-century Italian poets). I thought this Stevens group was Carter’s most overtly personal text setting, putting to music poems that were themselves looking back over a long life. And Lindsey blew me away with how vividly she conveyed Carter’s piercing nostalgia, with what transparency she allowed the Stevens poems to become both literally and emotionally accessible to the audience.

So it didn’t surprise me that before committing her performance to an immutable posterity, she wanted to make sure she had not just the literal meaning of my lines but the nuances of the poems firmly in place. Like me, she wanted to avoid melodrama and sentimentality, but she also wanted to convey real feelings (would that more opera singers took the words they were singing with such scrupulous seriousness!). So Kate (we were now on a first-name basis) sent me recordings of rehearsals and I gave her feedback on little details, often questions of emphasis where the musical annotations were ambiguous. I read her my poems, and she read them back to me. I was already impressed with how much she was able to accomplish in rehearsal, but the final recording is even more impressive. She really worked on this piece in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible. I’m thrilled with what’s on the recording.

(As I write this, I’m looking forward to coming down to New York on February 17 to join the delightful Wayne Koestenbaum, the superb soprano Rebecca Ringle and baritone Chrispher Burchett, cellist Adrian Daurov, pianist Geoffrey Burleson, saxophonist Michael Couper, and composer Mohammed Fairouz for a concert and poetry reading celebrating the release of the No Orpheus CD at (le) poisson rouge, 158 Bleeker Street.)

January 27, 2016

Spring 68 at Columbia was the season of the strike,The occupation of the buildings (Low, Hamilton, AveryMathematics, and Fayerwether where a righteousMininster married a young couple), and Mitch and IWent to the West End Bar to talk tactics becauseWe knew the "tactical patrol force" (TPF) wasGoing to come and hit hard. The days went byAnd the arm bands worn by angry studentsWent from green (amnesty) to black (mourningFor Alma Mater). But I still had my musicHumanities final to face and I was so ignorantI did the only thing I could do: bought Mozart'sJupiter, and Beethoven's 3rd, 5th, and 7th,And lucked out when on the final the profPlayed the slow movement of the 7th.And the next summer I spent in OxfordAnd the bells of one of the churches playedThe opening of the Jupiter every hourOn the hour. Years later I learned Mozart's birthday was also that of Kern,Jerry Kern of "Show Boat" and "The WayYou Look Tonight" and "Long AgoAnd Far Away." So I will just sayTo both of you: happy birthday!

December 25, 2015

This video clip is even better than the one I posted on Dean Martin 's birthday (June 7) of the famous reconciliation scene during the Jerry Lewis Telethon of 1976 twenty years after he and Dean Martin broke up their world-famous comedy act, with "Jer" playing the out of control overgrown teenager. and "Dino," nine years older, the straight man and Lothario. They had enjoyed a ten-year-run of movies and sold-out appearances at the Copa and other such hot spots when they decided, like many a couple, that they had irreconcilable differences and couldn't endure another day in each other's company. The Telethon encounter, arranged by the Godfather, was the first time they saw or spoke to each other after twenty years of stony silence. Sinatra: "I think it's time, don't you?" [Imagine if you could reconcile two warring nations this way.]. Notice the cigarettes -- not as props but as part of the routine in several senses. The Dean-Jerry exchange is sweet: "So. . . how ya been? . . . There were all these rumors about our break-up and when I came out to do the show and you weren't here I knew they were true. . .So. . .ya workin'?" Dean, on why they broke up: "Because I was a Jew and you were a Dago." The phone number line is good, the duet with Dean and Sinatra is funny ("I Can't Give You Anything But Love," "Too Marvelous for Words"), and though Dean is not in best voice, the sequence helps substantiate Jerry's assertion that he was the greatest straight man of all time. -- DL

November 05, 2015

Do his observations hold true today?

Over at Design*Sponge, one of my favorite blogs, Grace Bonney has introduced a new column wherein she asks favorite artists or designers to show and describe their teenage bedrooms. This got me thinking so I went through some old photos and found this one, of my sister:

She's reading "A Long Day in a Short Life," by Albert Maltz (1908 –1985), who wrote fiction, plays, and screenplays. Maltz was one of "the Hollywood Ten," a group of writers who were blacklisted when they refused to answer the House Un-American Activities Committee's questions about Communist Party affiliations, their own and those of their friends and colleagues. Maltz was fined and, in 1950, sentenced to a year’s imprisonment. Blacklisted in Hollywood and unable to work there for many years, he moved to Mexico after his release from prison and remained until 1962.

In 1946 Maltz published a controversial essay in which he criticized the shallow aesthetic tenets of the left, questioning whether art was to be used as a weapon in the class war. Here are a few excerpts.

It has been my conclusion for some time that much of left-wing artistic activity—both creative and critical-— has been restricted, narrowed, turned away from life, sometimes made sterile —because the atmosphere and thinking of the literary left wing has been based upon a shallow approach. Let me add that the left wing has also offered a number of vital intellectual assets to the writer—such as its insistence that important writing cannot be socially idle —that it must be humane in content, etc. Schneider enumerated these assets and I take them here for granted. But right now it is essential to discuss where things have gone wrong—why and how. I believe the effects of the shallow approach I have mentioned—like a poison in the bloodstream—largely cause the problems Schneider mentioned. Indeed, these problems are merely the pustules upon upon the body, the sign of ill health . . .

Whatever its original stimulating utility in the late twenties or the early thirties, this doctrine—"art is a weapon" —over the years, in day-to-day wear and tear, was converted from a profound analytic, historical insight into a vulgar slogan: "art should be a weapon." This, in turn, was even more narrowly interpreted into the following: "art should be a weapon as a leaflet is a weapon." Finally, in practice, it has been understood to mean that unless art is a weapon like a leaflet, serving immediate political ends, necessities and programs, it is worthless or escapist or vicious. The result of this abuse and misuse of a concept upon the critic's apparatus of approach has been, and must be, disastrous. From it flow all of the constrictions and—we must be honest— stupidities—-too often found in the earnest but narrow thinking and practice of the literary left wing in these past years. And this has been inevitable. First of all, under the domination of this vulgarized approach, creative works are judged primarily by their formal ideology. What else can happen if art is a weapon as a leaflet is a weapon? If a work, however thin or inept as a piece of literary fabric, expresses ideas that seem to fit the correct political tactics of the time, it is a foregone conclusion that it will be reviewed warmly, if not enthusiastically. But if the work, no matter how rich in human insight, character portrayal and imagination, seems to imply "wrong" political conclusions, then it will be indicted, severely mauled or beheaded—as the case may be.

Maltz was criticized harshly for the essay, so much so that he printed a retraction. Too bad. Do you think his observations hold true today?

I sometimes think that the ideal form for some poems may be the table of contents. Inveterate list-maker that I am, I am quite certain that the list or catalogue qualifies as a distinctively American form though hardly an indigenous one. Whitman’s lists in “Song of Myself” rank at the top of anyone’s list of great nineteenth-century list poems, and I’d argue that Cole Porter’s You’re the Top should occupy a similar position in the modern period.

Today, with Hollywood on my mind, I thought I’d offer up a pair of top-five lists, one devoted to the best performance of a song, the other to the best dance sequence, in classic American movies.

5) A toss-up between Astaire and Cy Charisse at the “Dem Bones Café” in The Band Wagon (Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz) and “America” (choreography Jerome Robbins; Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim), in West Side Story.

One virtue of such lists is that they reward the impulse toward inclusiveness.

Another is that they invite readers to counter with a rival list after voicing their outrage: How could he have left out “Comedy Tonight” from Richard Lester’s 1966 film version of Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum? Or "Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome," the great opening number featuring Joel Grey and chorus in Cabaret (1972)? How about Gene Kelly and Vera Ellen doing Rodgers’s “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” in On Your Toes, or Kelly on roller skates in It’s Always Fair Weather, or Dan Daley's drunk scene in the same movie, or the ballet that Kelly and Leslie Caron perform in Gershwin’s An American in Paris? About my own list, I note only and without comment that among composers only Harold Arlen and Leonard Bernstein appear more than once; among the performers, this is true of Sinatra, Astaire, Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, and Judy Garland.

And, David, can you really overlook the Bernard Herrmann song that loudly serenades Charles Foster Kane at the top of his career as a newspaper magnate?

And Dean Martin and company singing "That's Amore" in The Caddie ain't chopped liver.

Perhaps, in another post, I will talk about background music (like the stirring strain Elmer Bernstein created for The Magnficent Sevenor the march he wrote for The Great Escape) with a special sidebar on Herrmann's contributions to Hitchcock's movies.